Now we have everything packed for the Christmas Fair starting tomorrow. I took earlier this picture of the little 20grams skeins which I made for the fair (and also bigger ones), there are couple hundred of the smaller ones now ready.

I tried to make easy-to-make mittens with lots of colors. In the green block mittens I used Forest Selection colors and the red ones are made with Sunset Selection colors. Blocks are three stitches wide and four stitches high and there are six different colors, but you can use less or more colors.

In red striped mittens the other stripe is the same color all the time, but the other color varies. Very easy to make. In the blue mittens I used the same technique, but with two yarns that are same color, so that the mitten becomes thicker. I don't know how you would call this in English.

These mittens are easy to make and you can make them look like yourself by changing the colors.

In EnglishI am now so excited I can hardy write this! I got today the dye book I ordered last weekDominique Cardon: Natural dyes, Sources, Tradition, Technology and ScienceMore than 700 pages of natural dyeing!! Look how thick it it!!This is really xmas now for me, that book is the best present I could ever get. It was quite expensive so my relatives helped me as a christmas present, thank you Henna!!I should be now knitting mittens and reskeining yarn, but how can I concentrate on anything but the book? I love it!!!The main focus is on historical dyes, but there is 26 pages about mushroom dyeing (I had to look them of course first) and in a section of bloodred webcap there is a lot of Riikka Räisänen's study of it, just what I was writing about yesterday here.Now I have to go and read more:-)

In EnglishA little more about dyestuffs in the mushrooms. There is a really good article by Riikka Räisänen in Finnish Mycological Societys magazine Sienilehti no2 2006, but mostly only in Finnish, only an abstract is in English.She has done her Ph.D thesis on Cortinarius sanguinea, (Räisänen, R. 2002. Anthraquinones from the Fungus Dermocybe sanguinea as Textile Dyes. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Helsinki. Department of Home Economics and Craft Science Research Report 10. Vantaa: Dark. ISBN: 952-10-0537-8.)and I have been fortunate to hear her lectures couple of times on mushroom dyeing and dye chemistry. Another thing is, if I understoond anything about it, but I try:)In these mushrooms the dye pigments aren't there ready when the mushrooms pop up from the ground, but they evolve gradually, first yellow pigments and the red pigments are in the end of this synthesis, that is why I can get better reds from older mushrooms. It isn't this simple of course, but basically something like that.

About the enzymes in the mushrooms, this is something I had written up in the lecture about dye chemistry and I am not sure if I know the right words in English.Enzymes split the sugar parts (which makes the dye too soluble) away from the dyesuffs and thus makes the dye molecules attach better to the fabric and this way the color becomes stronger. Things that makes enzymes work better are aging, drying and fermenting. Enzymes work best in a slightly acid environment and warm temperature, heating destroys enzymes. This was about mushrooms, but maybe it also applys to the plant dyes.

In EnglishI finally dyed with dried Cortinarius semisanguineus (=Dermocybe semisanguineus), red-gilled cortinarius mushrooms, which I had collected this fall. This year was not very good for them and I did't get very much, but enough for couple of dyeings. They are not very big mushrooms, the cap is about 5-10cm (2-4inches) in diameter, but sometimes there are masses of them in dry pine forests. You can find them in even young pine copses some years, whereas another good Cortinarius dye mushroom, Cortinarius sanguineus, grows only in old spruce forests, where ther is a thick layer of moss. So that is why I prefer C. semisanguineus, it is easier to find where I live..

There are several close Cortinarius species, but you can easily identify Cortinarius semisanguineus, when you look under the cap: the gills are bloodred, stem long, slim and yellow with little red in the base.

Cortinarius semisanguineus contains more than ten different anthraquinones (i.e. emodin, dermocybin, dermorubin) and the quantities and proportions can vary depending on the age of the mushroom. These dyestuffs resemble those of madder and cochineal and when they are strong they are very lightfast colors. Because there are lot of different dyestuffs in these mushrooms, you can get a lot of different shades.. and never be sure which ones this time. If you dye with only the stems of the mushrooms, you will get more yellow colors and with only caps, you get more red colors. With young mushrooms you get more orangey colors and with older ones, more reddish colors.

With these mushrooms the easiest way to dye is to crush them, boil them and then dye straight with the strained bath with premordanted yarn. When I dye this way, I use about 1,5kg of fresh mushrooms/100grams of yarn. When I use yarn that has been premordanted couple of days earlier, and then rinsed properly (to be sure these is no unattached mordant left) before put in the dyebath, the color becomes good and I don't have to rinse them many times like I used to do when I mordanted at the same time. When dyeing with Cortinarius mushrooms, you must put a glug of vinegar in the water when you rinse the yarns after dyeing, just like with madder and cochineal.

In the summer of 2005 I was at the Finnish dyers meeting where Riikka Räisänen told how she had isolated Cortinarius sanguineus dyestuffs in the laboratory by using enzymatic hydrolysis. I understood that these were natural enzymes and this occured also when the mushroomes aged. Pictures of this isolation process here, scroll down a little, there is also a short description beside the photos in English. She also told that lightfastness of the unmordanted wool dyed in the bath that she got from acidic buffersolution of the mushrooms, was very good.

It inspired me to do my own experiments, very simple of course, because I didn't have a laboratory.

I crushed 4kilos of fresh Cortinarius semisanguineus and poured over them water mixed with a little vinegar, pH was about 4. Riikka had told that the optimum pH for the enzymes of Cortinarius sanguineus to work was 5, but I put in too much vinegar. I let the bucket be for 9 days and the pH was about the same the whole time, at least that is what I had written in my notebook. Then I strained the bath, it was dark orange as you can see in the picture. I put 200grams of unmordanted yarn to this bath, heated it to 90C for an hour and then let it cool over night. The result was nice orange, it is no1 in the picture below hanging on the rope outsíde.

To the already strained mushrooms I added a little water and Sinol, I think it is rubbing alcohol in English, I'm not quite sure. I was hoping that alcohol would dissolve some of the dyestuffs that were not watersoluble. Then the next day I added more water and boiled the mushrooms for 2 hours. After straining the mushrooms away, I put 200grams of yarn to the bath, 100grams of unmordanted yarn (no2) and 100grams of alummordanted yarn (no3), dyed at 90C for one hour and again let cool over night. Nice colors. For an afterbath I put 200grams of alum mordanted yarn, but the result was not very impressive, most of the color had already attached in the first bath. These yarns were dyed in 2005 and I was so pleased to this way of extracting color from these mushrooms that I have dyed all my cortinarius mushrooms like this since then. Most of the time I don't use any alcohol any more though, I just boil the mushrooms vigorously for at least 2 hours after the vinegar soak. Many mushroomdye books say that only one hour boiling is enough, but I boil them longer. Sometimes even twice. When I dye like this, most of the yellow dyestuffs come off to the first vinegar soak and the redder pigments are still left in the mushrooms, where I can get them by boiling the mushrooms.

Then to this falls dyeings. In the beginning of October my friend Aino gave me old Cortinarius semisanguineus mushrooms. I didn't have time to dye with them right away and they started to rot, so I couldn't dry them any more. So when I dyed with them, they were already red rotted juice in the plastic bag (luckily the bag didn't have any holes). There wer about 2 kilos of that juice, I boiled them vigorously, strained and to the first bath I put 100grams of alum mordanted yarn. After dyeing for two hours I took it from the bath and it was very nice red, no5 in the bottom picture. I put another 100grams of yarn to the bath and after one hour in 90C, I let it cool in the bath untill the next day. This was no6 in the picture. I got still another 100grams from that bath, no7. Here you can see clearly how the yellow pigments had disappeared somewhere when the mushrooms had aged:)

With young dried Cortinarius semisanguineus mushrooms I did the vinegar soak dyeing last week: I had 350 grams of dried mushrooms, I crushed and soaked them in water with a glug of vinegar (pH4) for 4 days and then strained the liquid. Then I got greedy! I put 400 grams of unmordanted yarn to the bath, that was too much. Even though I let the yarns steep in the bath until the next day, the color turned out quite pale orange, no 3. If I had had less yarn, the color would have been stronger. The 200grams of alum mordanted yarn from the after bath came out even paler, as expected, no 4.

I put more water over the strained mushrooms, let soak for one day and then boiled vigorously for over 2 hours. I then strained the bath and put 200 grams of alum mordanted wool to the cool bath. I took the yarns away from the pot after one hour, because the color looked good already, and put the once strained mushrooms back and boiled for couple of hours more. Then next day I dyed another 200grams of alum mordanted wool, which I let steep for the whole day in the bath, that is no 2.

I was a little disappointed to this dyeing, apart from putting too much yarn in the first bath, I don't know what was the problem, usually I do just the same way and get more yarn with strong colors. Maybe it was the weather in this fall, this is how it is with natural dyes, you can never be sure what you get:)

Added later: I thought over night about this and usually I have soaked the mushrooms in low pH for more than one week, now the soak was only four days so that could be it.

Pages

WHY USE NATURAL DYES

"We can keep the knowledge of their use alive, as well as regaining for ourselves a vital contact with the natural world. The ability to correctly identify the plants needed, to understand their growth stages sufficiently well to be able to obtain the greatest dye, offer both challenge and pleasure."

We sell our yarns, kits and other things at the market Kauppatori in Helsinki, several days a week during the summer season. I will write here in the beginning of each week which days we will be at the market. This week my husband will be at the market on Monday August 3rd, Thursday August 6th, Friday August 7th and Saturday August 8th.